Around the Web Digest: Week of December 13

Dear readers, this post is late and I apologize for nothing. Send me any links for inclusion here at rebecca.nelson.jacobs@gmail.com.

I hope you’ve been enjoying the glow of lights and the stir of familiar songs that seem to be everywhere these days… with the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens! The AAA blog featured this post using the movie to explore why movies about humans’ relationships with technology are so popular: Our Movies, Ourselves: Reel Life Vis-á-vis “Real Life”

This time of year seems to bring out a reflective streak in blogs. For example, Struggle Forever listed some of the fiction and non-fiction books worth reading from this year: My Favorite Books of 2015

Allegra also produced a list of books based on a reader survey of the most important and influential books for the discipline and beyond. Unsurprisingly, there’s a bias towards the mid-twentieth century classics, but some newer books were also recognized: The 30 Essential Books in Anthropology

In this interview on Coalition A.S. Color, Gloria Wong Padoongpatt discusses her graduate career using the lens of her research on microaggressions: Interview with Gloria Wong Padoongpatt on Microaggressions and Grad School

This post on the Scientific American blog Anthropology in Practice suggests that “anxiously attached” people are more inclined to spend time checking other people’s Facebook profiles than people who are secure or avoid attachment: Using Attachment Theory to Understand Facebook Stalking

With this post, the Anxious Anthropologist takes stock of the contributions a person with an anthropology background can make to a workplace, using personal examples: How Does an Anthropologist Add Value in the Workplace?

The Global Social Media Impact Study points out that, while Brazilians appeared to freak out about the WhatsApp ban, the actual impact was even greater than was visible in the public commentary, because it affected poorer people disproportionately: WhatsApp Ban in Brazil: The Word on the Ground

This Discard Studies post makes the provocative statement that “ontology” is just another word for colonialism: An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn

+972 Magazine, which focuses on commentary related to Israel and Palestine, featured this explanation of the boycott vote: Why U.S. Anthropologists Voted to Boycott Israeli Academia

IFL Science featured this article on a burial pit in modern-day France with at least 14 mutilated individuals, suggestive of an act of war: Mutilated Skeletons Provide Glimpse of Neolithic Warfare

See you next week! Also coming soon: the much anticipated annual roundup!

Rebecca Nelson

Rebecca Nelson is the executive director of América Solidaria U.S. She recently graduated with a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on volunteer tourism in Guatemala and how it is opening up new avenues for tourists and hosts to develop more cosmopolitan understandings of the world (as well as opening up new forms of friction over the circulation of knowledge).

2 thoughts on “Around the Web Digest: Week of December 13

  1. I am struck by the fact that the most recently published book on the Allegra list is Appadurai 1996. It will soon be 2016. Can everything else published in the last two decades be consigned to the not essential pile?

  2. Hi John, I had the same impression. There’s exactly one book with a date in this millennium: Das’ “Life and Words.” I suspect it has to do with how they asked the question, soliciting titles from readers that have influenced Western thought. This would bias the list towards older titles because their influence over time is easier to track and perhaps because the volume of scholarly production and disciplinary differentiation wasn’t as high in the mid-twentieth century. I’d really like to see a list of 30 essential titles from the last twenty years.

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